Colares / Operação Prato

Origin Story

Starting in mid-1977, residents across the fishing communities of Colares island, on the Amazon delta north of Belém, began describing the same strange visitor: a silent light, sometimes disc-shaped, sometimes shaped like a giant flashlight, that appeared over rooftops and riverbanks at night. Locals named it "chupa-chupa," sucker-sucker, after what many said it did to them: hover close, fire a beam, and leave behind burns, punctures, and a lasting weakness. Mayor José Ildone Favacho Soeiro asked the Brazilian Air Force for help, and in September 1977 it opened Operação Prato ("Operation Saucer"), its first and so far only investigation built entirely around UFO reports.

Evidence & Claims

Captain Uyrangê Bolívar Soares Nogueira de Hollanda Lima led a small team of intelligence officers who spent roughly four months in Colares and thirty nearby villages, interviewing hundreds of witnesses and, according to the eventual case file, photographing the lights themselves on several occasions. Local hospitals reported an unusual run of patients with the same complaint: circular burns and reported blood loss with no obvious cause. Brazil kept the file closed for over two decades before partially declassifying it in 2004, releasing photographs, witness sketches, and officer reports that corroborated the civilian accounts rather than dismissing them. Hollanda, by then a colonel, broke a long public silence in August 1997, giving Brazilian ufologists a detailed interview about the operation. He died by suicide two months later, in October 1997, a death his interviewer and friend has attributed to a long-standing depressive illness rather than to anything he revealed, though the timing has kept speculation alive among some researchers regardless.

Skeptical Explanations

No chupa-chupa injury was ever independently linked to a specific physical cause, and Brazilian investigators at the time floated possibilities ranging from ball lightning to mass panic amplified by a genuine, unrelated illness moving through the same villages. What is unusual, and rarely disputed, is that a national air force devoted a sustained, multi-month field investigation to the claims rather than dismissing them outright, and that the resulting file was substantial enough to be worth declassifying decades later. Colares today leans fully into the story, marketing itself as "the city of ETs," with alien murals, an "Operação Prato" restaurant, and ET-themed guesthouses lining a town that spent the late 1970s convinced something was hunting it after dark.

Colares is reached by boat from Belém, either a direct ferry or a combination of bus and ferry via Vila do Conde or Icoaraci; there is no bridge or airport on the island. The town fully embraces its "Cidade dos ET's" (City of ETs) reputation, with alien murals, ET-themed guesthouses, and a restaurant named for Operação Prato itself serving regional Amazon dishes. There is no dedicated museum, but a small local study space keeps sketches and lore tied to the 1977 flap, and hiring a guide through a Belém travel agency is the easiest way to reach the harder-to-find beaches, like Praia do Humaitá, where the earliest sightings were reported. Go prepared for a genuine Amazon river island: humid, mosquito-heavy, and with limited English spoken.